Frankfurt Museums

One of the best things about Frankfurt - other than the plentiful bakeries and endless supply of flaky pastries  - is the number of museums. I started off intending to visit a new one every weekend when I had time, but I have got stuck of late on the Städel Museum. It's a world-class art museum, and I've been three times already and not yet seen it all.

Once I had a permanent address I bought a "MuseumsuferCard" from the Tourist Information office at Dom-Römer. "Museumsufer" is the name given to the south bank of the Main which is lined with museums - "Museums Embankment" (until just now I thought it was Museum + Sufer, but I've just discovered from a dictionary check that it is Museums + Ufer). The card costs €75 for a year, with entry to 34 museums. It currently costs €14 to get into the Städelmuseum on the weekends, so it really seems like a good deal. I wouldn't have been swanning in and out of that museum for the last three weekends if I didn't have the card - instead I'd have expired somewhere in there on my first visit, probably surrounded by all those pictures of Christian martyrdom and suffering in the Old Masters galleries.

The following are the museums I have visited so far.

1. The Natural History Museum (Senckenberg Naturmuseum Frankfurt)

€6 to enter. Open all week, and until 20:00 on Wednesdays.

I went here not long after I arrived, and it's high time I went back. It was one of the better natural history museums I've visited - not visually spectacular like the one in Paris, but with good, broad collections on display of the things that interest me - fish, mammals, a good room on insects, and so on. There were dioramas of German/European wildlife that were really nicely done, with none of that faded moth-eaten and forgotten look you often find in such displays. It helps when your scenery is rich mossy forest, I suppose.

There wasn't much information in English in there, so I worked my way round with the dictionary on my iPad and used it as an opportunity to learn words like der Affe (ape), die Libelle (dragonfly) and der Kugelfisch (puffer fish), that are nice to know but admittedly difficult to slip into everyday conversation.

2. The Museum for Applied Art (Museum für Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt)

€8 to enter. (It took some effort to find that out - they have a shockingly bad museum website.)

I didn't see too much of the permanent collection when I visited, since I went to see the Entdeckung Korea! (Discover Korea) exhibition, now moved on to Stuttgart. The exhibition was pretty good - it gathered Korean artworks from around Germany, and though the collection was slightly disjointed feeling, the blown up photographs and short film from the late 19th century added a lot.

I looked very briefly around the permanent Asian collection and some of the European collection, mediaeval and later. It also felt a bit disjointed - like the website, maybe needs a bit more work on presentation - but it will be worth going back to look around some more. I didn't look through the Villa Metzler that is attached to the museum, either.

3. The Goethe House (Frankfurter Goethe-Haus)

€7 to enter.

Perhaps more interesting as a preserved late 18th century house of a well-to-do Frankfurt family than specifically as Goethe's house, since it's the one that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe grew up in rather than the one he lived in as an adult (there's one of those in Weimar). It's a nice house - sparsely furnished and without much in the way of contemporary objects, but enough to give you some sense of the aesthetics of the time. The decoration has been nicely restored. As often, I found myself wishing I could have their kitchen, though of course it would be even better if it came with their cooks and servants. It seems like an interesting and enlightened family, valuing education for the daughter as well as the son. The audio guide tells you a little about the individual rooms, and something about the individual objects, and adds something to the visit - though in the style of such things, it's nice when you can cast it off at the end.

4. The Museum of Ethnology (Weltkulturen Museum)

€5 to enter.

This was my only completely disappointing visit so far. I went here on a Sunday, having checked the opening times, and arrived at the museum building (the one signposted as the Weltkuturen Museum) to find it closed up with no sign of life. After circling around it for a while along with an equally confused looking French man, I finally found the building two along open - the Welkulturen Labor, apparently the image archive (the building between them was the Weltkulturen Library, also closed up). In it there were two small special exhibitions to go along with the New Zealand theme of this year's book fair. The first was, according to the museum's website:

FACE TO FACE / KANOHI KI TE KANOHI / FA'AFESAGA'I
Graphic artworks from Francis Pesamino... on display with artefacts from the Polynesian collection of the Weltkulturen museum. 

 My New Zealand colleague tells me that Pesamino is very well known, and I'm sure it would be good to know more about his work - but the exhibition did nothing for me. It seemed like a very random collection of objects just put there to give the most basic understanding of the kind of design tradition Pesamino was working on top of. As to his works, they consisted of six or so large posters stapled casually to each end of the room - big faces, writing on them. The whole thing was just a bit hard to connect with. It needed some further context, or a completely different set of surrounding objects and artworks (comparable or contrasting graphic artworks, perhaps).

Not as hard to connect with as what awaited one floor up, though. This was the INCREDIBLY HOT SEX WITH HIDEOUS PEOPLE exhibition that is currently advertised all over Frankfurt. This is the title of a "zine" self-published over a number of years by somebody in New Zealand, and distributed in pubs. At least, that's what I understood. We're talking about black and white, hand drawn & often hand-written copied rags of the kind you'd use as beermats in the pub and that you'd expect were done by layabout male university students who never cleaned their flats or took a shower. The exhibition had them all strung up on the walls like a home display of Christmas cards. I got nothing at all out of this exhibition. I didn't even understand what I was supposed to be getting out of it, though looking back at the museum site I find it tells me that it "presents New Zealand's Zine Culture with Underground Literature and Comics."

Soon, I'll write up my visits to the Städelmuseum, including to its current major exhibition "Schwarze Romantik - von Goya bis Max Ernst."

Feed a cold, starve a fever.

I'm sitting at home on this rainy Sunday using the faint cold I picked up at work as an excuse to feel sorry for myself and sit around and eat pastries and cheese and crisps and drink tea. I've been really lucky in the last few years to hardly ever catch a cold - but my new job is a hotbed of germ activity, and it's surprising it's taken me two and a half months to catch anything. I work in an enormous open room like field (but without any fresh air), with I suppose somewhere between 60 and 80 people. To get in and out there are two heavy security doors that can only be opened by use of the door handles; then there are the buttons on the lifts and time-tracking machines, and so on - all shared by my roomful of people and many, many more (the company covers several floors). On top of that, we have lots of shared equipment. If bird flu or SARS or ebola hits Frankfurt, we'll be the first to go.

As I was indulging myself in unhealthy food just now, I remembered the saying, "Feed a cold, starve a fever." When I was young I thought it was hard to remember whether it was that or "Starve a cold, feed a fever" - nor did I really know what it meant. I thought it meant that if you ate lots when you had a cold, you wouldn't get a fever (because, mysteriously, fevers would feed off you if you didn't feed your cold). I also didn't understand "No news is good news," taking it to mean that all news was bad. Well, these weren't the kinds of things I heard in my family - they were the kinds of things I read in books, so there was no-one to pick up on my mistakes or clarify. I still quite like "All news is bad" as a saying, though.

Things to Cheer You Up

Saturday is shopping day for me here in Frankfurt - mainly because supermarkets and most other shops still close on Sundays. It's also the day for the market on Berger Strasse (it's there on Wednesdays too, but that's not much use for those of us who work all day), and if you want to cook it's much better to go there than to the supermarket. The vegetable selection in the supermarkets around here is very limited in comparison to those of everywhere else I've lived, and the vegetables often don't seem especially good. The market, on the other hand, has all sort of fresh produce, and also has stalls selling bread, spices, cheeses, fish - a rich shopping experience that doesn't resemble at all the markets of Saltcoats or Doncaster (the two of which combined to form my early image of "the market") that seemed to sell mostly socks and oranges.

Today I shopped for all sorts in the Berger Strasse shops - things I've had on a list since I moved in, but hadn't got around to searching for or buying. I tried to do it all in one trip: Woolworths (yes, there is still Woolworths here, which along with C&A made me feel at first as if I'd been taken back in time to an early 1980s Scottish high street - all that was missing was John Menzies. Is there still John Menzies in Scotland? It seems impossible that this wouldn't have disappeared too, such a different life belongs it to for me) for things like food containers and coat hangers; a hardware store for a padlock (we have a storage enclosure in the cellar that needs to be locked); the electrical store Saturn for extension cords; and others. By the time I was done (adding in soya milk from the natural foods supermarket and bread and vegetables from the market) and had carried it all home, my arms had stretched a good nine inches. They're slowly shrinking back to something like normal length now.

Among my acquisitions was one thing bought just for the pleasure it gave me (at the beginning of the shopping trip, before I got weighted down). It is this espresso cup and saucer, from Könitz:

I've seen Könitz things here and there before - I've bought a couple of their mugs in the U.S. - but since they're a German company their stuff is much easier to find here. I love the colorful animal designs, but my favorite thing about them is the little design inside each one that shows itself to the person drinking, like a secret message (though only if you're right-handed, I suppose). They remind me of various antique trick cups I was shown when I was a child - the pewter beer tankard with glass bottom so no-one could take you by surprise as you swigged; cups with china frogs crouched in them; a cup that somehow diverted the liquid when you tried to drink (to pour it in your lap? That wouldn't be very amusing). They remind me too of the bowls that my great aunt had with a blue fish design in the middle, and the fascination of spooning away the melted remnants of vanilla ice cream to try at last to reveal the fish that was hiding there.

And, while I am at it, here are other things that cheer me up every time I see them.

The lions on the wall of the underground station Zoo that I go through every day on my way to and from work. The expressions on the face of the lioness is funny, as if she's a little ambivalent about her role in life (and her relationship with the male lion); the male lion looks oddly human, as if it were based on someone the artist knew:

The whole station is painted in Noah's Ark theme - a biblical reference I find slightly irritating in connection with a zoo (why not just animals? Why do they have to be caught up in some foolish anthropocentric myth?), but some of the pictures are lovely all the same. Another time I will add in photos from Habsburgerallee, the next stop along the line, mysteriously decorated all round with donkeys, each one of which is carrying something different on its back (a cross; a syringe, possibly a chair... I can't think what else just now). Somewhere in there is a picture of two donkeys mating, which always amuses me when I see it.

Finally, a squirrel in my garden. They move so quickly, it's hard to take a photo:

I watched a couple of them for a while earlier on. They bound around, carrying chestnuts here and there. One of them buries something, then another one comes and digs it up and bounds around with it for a while before burying it somewhere else again. They're very funny, and very red.

Hisashiburi ni

It's been a while, but here I am. No longer Majo in Denver - 

Majo is now in Frankfurt.

I found the gate of academia left open a crack, and I bolted. I'm now a translator for a huge company full of very, very young people. I may not have much of a future there, but for the moment it has got me out of teaching and out of Colorado, and life beyond work certainly has much more to it than Denver could ever offer.

Not that the transition has been easy - in fact, it's been a bit too much of an adventure (ein Abenteuer!), and if I'd had the benefit of foresight I probably wouldn't have come at all. In spite of having moved countries before, I'd never moved anywhere where I couldn't communicate at least to some limited degree. Though of course almost everyone in Germany can speak some English, it doesn't always mean that they actually will, and it has been a long and painful struggle to get practical things sorted out, from setting up my prepay phone to finding an apartment to getting my internet working. Still, now a month and a half in things are settling down. I have a nice apartment, the internet was finally sorted a few days ago, and I bought a Korean rice cooker yesterday - life is civilized again.

In another month and a half I will go back to Colorado (Lufthansa-cabin-crew-willing) and fetch J and the cats. The latter are, of course. blissfully unaware just now that they're going to be uprooted from their home and garden, stuffed into bags and stuck under plane seats for ten hours, but I assuage my sense of guilt by remembering that I have at least found them a place with a garden here too, and that this one often has bunnies in it. They will go out on leashes only (landlady's decree, as well as my own inclination), so there should be no unfortunate confrontations  - but it will be fun to see how they react.

We also have lovely red squirrels, and blackbirds. I have missed the sound of blackbirds in the evening!

BBC English

Is it just me, or is the BBC (at least the online branch of it) completely losing its grip on English usage? On the current cucumber e-coli scare in Europe, it says:

The cucumbers, believed to have been imported from Spain, were infected with a severe complication of E.coli called hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS).

Surely cucumbers can't be infected with such a syndrome? Isn't it rather that contaminated cucumbers have caused people to become infected with it (or more correctly, that they have caused people to become infected with the strain of e-coli that is associated with it, so that those people have then developed the syndrome itself)? Otherwise, wouldn't we be treating the cucumbers instead of the people?

As if the headline wasn't bad enough - "Deadly Cucumbers Claim More Lives." It sounds like something from an episode of The X-Files.

I've been relying on the BBC website for my daily news for years now. Recently I've started paying for the New York Times online, though - it seems to have much higher standards (not to mention a nice blog where one of the news editors monitors and discusses language errors in the published paper).

It's bad enough having to read all of these student papers with "loose" for lose, "then" for "than" (or is it "than" for "then"? In any case, for a large number of my students the two are pronounced just the same, so it's easy to understand why they get confused) and "effect" for "affect," without having to see the BBC let such careless writing pass too. It makes me wonder why I bother.

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I wrote them a "comment" about it through a form on the BBC site, and today it reads:

The cucumbers, believed to have been imported from Spain, were contaminated with E.coli which left people ill with hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS).

Was it because of me? Or a wave of dissenting voices? I don't know.

New Term

The new term is upon us. I am horribly overloaded, since they canceled one of my courses last term and I had to propose a new cancel-proof course for this term to make it up, added to my normal load. It needed to draw a good audience, and it did. A full class today, more people than I could quite focus on - though that was probably more to do with the weird classroom set up than actual numbers. I walked in to find a huge room with vaulted ceiling and windows filling one end, like a 1970s Methodist church, and students packed round tables pushed into a large square - so that I had to move numbers of them before I could even have a front of class to stand in. Throughout the class I felt as if I was stuck in Da Vinci's Last Supper done over in the style of Bruegel and then photographed by Gursky.

The King's Speech

We went to see The King's Speech on Christmas Day, along with a surprisingly large number of other people - a mostly greying crowd of couples or small groups of friends. Somehow on Christmas Day, when it is otherwise so quiet, it can be a relief to see a bunch of strangers and participate in the same activity as them, to be part of a crowd without having to actively communicate with anyone - a comforting but very light polarity.

I'd heard about The King's Speech on the radio and thought it sounded interesting, but had wondered a little at how something so undramatic as a speech impediment and its treatment, and the friendship between patient (king or otherwise) and doctor, could be spun into a whole film. But it could - I thought it was excellent, and for the first time in quite a while never found myself glancing at my watch during a lull in interest. (In contrast - we went to see Tron 2 a few days ago, and there were only about ten minutes of it near the beginning that weren't a lull in interest. Not my type of film, of course, but I was surprised that it didn't even hold my attention with the visuals after the one quite striking game scene at the beginning, with its glowing motorbike trails. And the script was just appalling. I know it's not the point in such a film, but they still have to have paid someone money to write it...)

Lots of good acting in this film - and nicely understated. It was surprising (but gratifying) to see Guy Pearce acting as King Edward (or crown prince, for much of the film) and to remember that most of us first saw him as Mike in Neighbours. Very far from that! He's an interesting character in this film - irresponsible, selfish, and pointedly cruel at times, but with a more human side (for want of a better word) too. I suppose the same is true of each of the characters: complex knots of ambition, pride, fear, friendship and love.

The snobbery towards colonials that comes out when Lionel, the Australian therapist, auditions for Shakespeare (as well as in some of the King's outbursts) is well depicted too - it's something that still clearly exists in Britain today, that baseless sense of innate superiority, but I'm sure was much worse when backed up by Empire. A few days ago I was explaining modern Korean history, and reflecting on Japanese Imperial attitudes of the pre-war period - Japan annexed Korea in 1910, had Koreans learn Japanese and consider themselves subjects of the Emperor, yet they continued to treat Koreans as something lesser - so always presenting the Imperial task as helping another peoples up, but at the same time always making sure that the goal of equality was out of reach. British Empire seems to have worked in the same way, though with varying degrees of "lesser" depending on the colour of your skin. It's astounding to have a system where you expect loyalty to King/Queen and Empire from all subjects, no matter how far they live from the center, and then treat the ex-centric as ill-favoured and backward offspring who should be grateful for the scraps they get from the dinner table.

The way that the fairly simple interpersonal drama of King and therapist is painted against a historical backdrop, both overtly (rise of Hitler, outbreak of war) and more subtly with this exploration of attitudes makes it an engaging film. And all without sex, spurting blood and gore, or 3D effects!